Patriotic Gore

By Paul Berman

Published: July 1, 2001

THE LAST EMPIRE

ESSAYS 1992-2000.

By Gore Vidal.

465 pp. New York:

Doubleday. $27.50.

GORE VIDAL'S new book, ''The Last Empire,'' contains 48 essays, four or five of which are quite good -- lively, instructive, lucid and amusing. Vidal has a carefree touch and a humorous air, and when he sits in front of some other author's book, turning its pages and quoting the good parts and interjecting comments of his own, he can conjure several of the pleasures and even some of the romance of reading. The fat volume of Edmund Wilson's diaries of the 1960's opens before him. Vidal thumbs through, noticing Wilson's polemics and friendships, his observations on blacks, Jews, the Civil War, books, old age and sundry writers. ''He is certainly at his best,'' Vidal says of Wilson, ''when he turns the lights on a literary figure whom he knows and then walks, as it were, all around him.''

That is pretty much what Vidal does in his essay on Wilson, and again in essays on Wilson's friends, the Greenwich Village novelists Dawn Powell and Isabel Bolton, and even on Sinclair Lewis, the Prairie Bard, of whom Vidal turns out to be surprisingly fond. He has no particular thesis to hammer home about those people. But, with his lights on, he does glance at their achievements and personalities and, in the case of Wilson and his women friends, at the sexual tensions among them. Vidal is shrewd on sexual matters. He cringes at Wilson's prejudices about homosexuality.

And in his chatty manner Vidal succeeds at last in evoking an atmosphere that is now long gone -- of a midcentury era when the last dust motes of the 19th century had not yet scattered, and literature could thrive because (as viewed through the gas-lit shimmer of Vidal's attractive nostalgia) the stately pace of life encouraged a habit of thoughtfulness.

On the other hand, even in these literary essays, where he finds himself most at ease, Vidal can't help slipping from time to time into what seems to be one or another obsessive mania. The essay on Wilson, which opens the book (a characteristic gesture by Vidal: his megacollection of essays from 1993, ''United States,'' likewise began with a homage to Wilson), introduces us at once to the first and most insistent of his bugbears, which is the horribleness of Abraham Lincoln. Having scrutinized all these essays -- on literature, American history and politics, in nearly equal portions -- I have come to know Vidal's manias, and to fear them. Apart from the horribleness of Lincoln (which is owing to Lincoln's dictatorial behavior in the Civil War, which ruined America forever), they are, in no particular order, the perfidy of Franklin Roosevelt in regard to Pearl Harbor, the income tax and Harry Truman's decision on Feb. 27, 1947, to put up a fight against the Soviet Union, thus replacing America's republican traditions with a sinister American empire.

The merest mention of one of these delicate topics has an electrifying effect on Vidal. Out comes his bugle, and he plays ''charge'' and dashes up the stairs, like the madman in ''Arsenic and Old Lace.'' He never seems to tire, either. In an essay that first appeared in Vanity Fair, he tells us that ''Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold and tepid. Exact date of replacement? Feb. 27, 1947. Place: White House Cabinet Room. Cast: Truman, Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, a handful of Congressional leaders.''

And then, as if exhilarated by his phrasing, he writes, in an essay that appeared in The Times Literary Supplement of London: ''It was Acheson who launched the global empire on Feb. 27, 1947. Place: Cabinet Room of the White House. Present: Truman, Secretary of State Marshall, Under Secretary Acheson, a half-dozen Congressional leaders.''

Vidal does seem to recognize that on these particular points his excitement may have carried him away, or at least that other people may think so. But in self-defense he invokes proper authority by pointing out in his title essay and elsewhere that Edmund Wilson himself, the hero of heroes, clung to certain of these views. Here Vidal is on strong ground. By a bizarre coincidence, Wilson was prone to the identical manias, with a few variations. The tyrannical character of Abraham Lincoln, the Rooseveltian perfidy vis-à-vis Pearl Harbor, the loathsomeness of the income tax, together with the oppressively imperial nature of modern America -- those were Wilson's ideas exactly, during his later years. Like Vidal, Wilson even managed to write about those notions with an unmistakably cranky sound, as if thumping his cane.

In Wilson's case, though, the occasional fits of crankiness only testified to the authenticity of his thinking and emotions. His ideas were his own, and he was not going to subject them to the conventions of taste or fashion or even (here his cane began to thump) to the tests of evidence and common sense, unless he damn well felt like it. Crankiness, for Wilson, was a kind of superiority. Anyway, Wilson knew how to keep his own worst ideas from getting the best of him -- to speak his mind and move on. But in Vidal's case the ideas are Wilson's, and the crankiness, being obsessive, does not move on.